


This Vacation Officially Sucks

by graphospasm



Category: Predator (1987), Predator Series, 幽☆遊☆白書 | YuYu Hakusho: Ghost Files
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Humor, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, POV First Person, Swearing, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-03-28 09:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13901103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graphospasm/pseuds/graphospasm
Summary: It was supposed to be a routine assignment, an in-and-out mission, a small favor for Spirit World. It didn't hurt that we were getting a tropical vacation in the bargain...and then the goddamn alien showed up. Some vacation this turned out to be.In which the YYH gang fights an alien (or, more specifically, a Yautja/Predator) and it goes exactly how you'd expect.





	1. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Yusuke begins his story out of order, because it's Yusuke.

"All right, that is  _it!"_ I bellowed. "This vacation  _officially_ _sucks!"_

Kuwabara tore his Spirit Sword out of the stomach of a massive purple critter that had a bunch of little feelers growing from its face, and then he wiped his forehead with his wrist. One of the feelers had ripped off and landed in his hair; it looked like he had an octopus sprouting out of his head.

" _Really_ , Urameshi?" he asked with forced astonishment. "You mean you're not having  _fun?"_

For a moment I thought about what it would be like to rip off Kuwabara's dick for that comment, but I didn't actually go through with it, mostly because I didn't like the thought of touching Kuwabara's junk. Today had been bad enough already.

"Because I am having a  _fantastic_ time!" he said. The Sword in his fist disappeared when he gave me the finger. "That's right, fantastic! Fan- _fucking_ -tastic! Because I always wanted to get chased halfway across a  _fucking_ continent by  _fucking_ aliens with  _fucking_ alien bloodhounds who want to rip my  _fucking_ balls off!"

I would have yelled at him right back had the trees above us not started to rustle. I took a wide stance and aimed my Spirit Gun at the moving leaves, powering the blast up to full strength in little more than a half second. Kuwabara started dual-wielding the Spirit Sword beside me. It was just Hiei, though, who came dropping out of the canopy to land on the ground in front of us with a grunt.

" _I'll_  rip your fucking balls off if you don't  _shut the fuck up!_ " Hiei spat as he stood. He brandished his usual sword at his side; small scratches on his arms leaked blood onto his skin. He'd lost his cloak hours ago, shirt a smoldering cinder somewhere on the jungle floor. "They're not far off now!"

"Which way they comin'?" I said.

Hiei pointed over his shoulder and grunted, which I guess was a yes. 

"Kurama get his shit done?"

Another grunt, possibly another 'yes'—and then I heard an  _actual_ 'yes' from behind me and Kurama came walking out of the brush like he owned the goddamn place. His normally almost-disgustingly-pretty hair wasn't as pretty as usual; jungle humidity had made it frizz, but that was basically the only damage Kurama had to show for our little jungle jaunt. That _bastard_.

"Don't sneak up on us like that!" Kuwabara shrieked.

"I apologize," Kurama said. He came over and looked down at himself, and then the asshole started brushing off his jeans all delicate-like. "I wonder if I will  _ever_ get these stains out."

"You're joking," I said. The only stains on him were mud stains on his pant legs and a few drops of bright green blood on his collar. He'd worn white and how he didn't look as bedraggled as the rest of us was beyond me.

"I like this shirt," came his prim response and I was starting to hate his fucking guts at that point. I mean,  _c'mon_. Kurama turned serious while I imagined throwing mud into his hair. "The traps are set," he said.

"Fuckin' peachy," I said. I settled back into my wide stance and aimed my Gun in the direction Hiei had pointed. "Get ready to play the welcoming committee, guys."

They settled in around me without a word—and judging by the deranged smile on Hiei's face, he was as eager to pound this goddamn alien's ugly mug in as I was.

Oh, yeah. That's right. I said "alien." Not a demon, not an apparition, not a psychic—a real fucking honest-to-goodness _alien_ with extraterrestrial dogs for pets and a face like a deformed baboon ass crossed with a pitcher plant. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself, now aren't I?

The story of the most suck-ass vacation in history started way, way earlier than that—and it was all Koenma's fault.


	2. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Yusuke's mission gets off to a foreboding start.

It was supposed to be a routine assignment, an in-and-out mission, a  _small_ favor for Spirit World—and it didn't hurt that we were getting a tropical vacation in the bargain. Hell, Koenma even fronted our plane tickets and hotel costs; no way was I passing this up, even if it did mean dedicating a few days to bushwhacking and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

And also giant mutated dog-fuckers, but that part comes later.

Anyway, tropical getaway, free room and board for two weeks, blah blah blah, it's perfect, Kuwabara pretty much thought the same and he agreed to come with me. So did Kurama, and when Kurama does something you can bet your sack he'll somehow get Hiei in on it, too, which of course he did. I didn't ask how; Kurama just got smugly-smirky and Hiei looked super pissed when Kuwabara made a big deal over the shrimp tagging along, so I assume Kurama had embarrassed or tricked Hiei into participating or something. Getting a sword through my gut wasn't worth finding out which.

The first thing that should have tipped me off that this wasn't going to be a 'small' mission at all was when I asked if I could bring Keiko along and Koenma said "Absolutely not" with his most hideous "Oh my god we're all doomed" face in the history of _ever_. I wanted to bring her because I figured I could convince the guys to not say anything and make Keiko believe I was paying for the whole trip. She's always asking to go on trips so I was sure something this extravagant would get her to shut up for at least a month, but nothin' doin'—Koenma said no and I didn't push it.

Maybe I should have. Maybe, if I had, I wouldn't have gotten into the whole damn mess in the first place.

Getting Hiei on a plane was a bit of a nightmare (he didn't like leaving his sword in Kurama's luggage, he pitched a wild fit when his ears started popping during the ascent, the peanuts were way too salty, all that shit) but he calmed down once he got his binky—I mean, his sword back and could, in his own words, "breathe without that filthy human stink clogging up my nostrils." Kurama told him to calm the fuck down (in a more Kurama way, which involved a whole lot of smiling that somehow looked more threatening than a gun to the head) and we took the shuttle to our hotel without further trouble, apart from Kuwabara having to find a payphone to call his sister and his stupid cat to tell them he touched down safely. I called Keiko while we were at it; she was busy so I just left a message, and that was OK with me because I didn't want to trip myself up by saying how pretty the beaches were.

When I'd found out Keiko couldn't come with us, I'd decided that she didn't need to know I was on a half vacation. My story was that this was all a favor to Koenma in a horrible bumfuck part of the world. Siberia, probably. I let her fill in the blanks.

For the next two days the four of us just goofed off. Our resort was seaside and had, like, a billion pools and then the beach itself was awesome and there was a free spa (which only Kurama used, I swear I didn't get a seaweed wrap and anyone who claims otherwise is a dirty rotten liar), not to mention all the food you could ever want, so we pigged out and I got a wicked sunburn when I fell asleep on the beach but luckily Kurama had some sort of plant thing that took care of it in time for me n' Kuwabara to drag Hiei to a club and get him super fucking plastered. Kurama had to take care of Shorty's hangover the next morning, too, but he had a plant for that so it was all cool even though Hiei tried to kill me the next day. Kurama patched up  _those_ wounds with yet another leafy thing. We hadn't even started our mission but he was busier than I think he'd been in months.

Speaking of Kurama and plants, you could tell he loved being on this trip. We'd traveled to a small tropical country in the South Pacific, I'd never heard of it, but Kurama kept disappearing into the jungles around our hotel and coming back with the  _weirdest_ plants. Most of the country was a nature preserve, I think, and no one was allowed to go into the jungles without the permission of the government, but Kurama hardly seemed to care when he would shrink the plants back into their seed forms and tuck them into his hair for safekeeping. He kept gushing about how much he looked forward to growing all these rare species in his greenhouse back home (though if by 'home' he meant his house in Human World or his bachelor-crash-pad in Demon World I can't say) and when he ran out of plants to talk about he'd just vanish into the jungle again and come back with a ba-zillion more. He's really easy to please, that guy, though his hair-care regimen seems a little seedy and fuck you, I can make puns if I want, so sue me. 

On the third morning at the hotel, we woke up to find a letter on our suite's dining table. In it were instructions from Koenma (not that they actually told us all that much) and bright and early the next morning we followed his instructions to the letter: We dressed in light, durable clothes, packed stuff for a few days of roughing it in the jungle, and took a cab to the airport. A helicopter took us out to the middle of the jungle, where we basically jumped out before it even hit the ground and then watched it fly off again. According to the shit in the envelope, we were to poke around the jungle to look for "strange activity," take care of whatever it was when (or if) we found it, and then come back to the drop-off point at noon three days later so we could enjoy the rest of our vacation.

It seemed straightforward enough... or, it  _would've_ seemed straight forward enough had the dude piloting the 'copter not grabbed Kuwabara's hand right before he jumped ship and pressed a string of prayer beads into it. Then he said something in whatever language was native to this bit of the tropics and zoomed away like something was about to bite his ass off.

"Get yourself an admirer, buddy?" I teased as the whup-whup-whup of the heli got farther and farther away.

Kuwabara looked at the rosary with a constipated and/or freaked-out expression; those look really similar on Kuwabara. "Shut up. He was  _warnin_ ' me about somethin', that's all." He looked to Kurama. "You don't happen to know what he was talking about, do you?"

"I can only assume it has to do with our mission," Kurama said.

"Not that we even know what that is," I grumbled.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Kurama said. His eyes twinkled; he was gloating about something, as always. "While walking in the jungle I overheard a group of poachers telling campfire stories. They seem quite convinced that this area of the jungle is inhabited by a monster who kills men for sport."

Kuwabara shivered. "Spooky."

"Isn't it obvious?" Hiei snapped. "A demon lives in these woods."

"How do you figure?" I asked.

Hiei looked like he was ready to cut my head off for being stupid—meaning, he looked pretty normal. "We're here on a  _mission_ ," Hiei sneered. "Koenma knows about the demon and he's sent us to kill it. A  _child_  could have figured that out."

It seemed like a likely enough story. Kurama more or less agreed with Hiei a second later and that was enough for me and Kuwabara to go along with it, too, though not before Kuwabara asked Hiei if the shrimp himself was the child he'd mentioned. The results were not pretty. 

"I get the feeling Hiei is the thing Kuwabara should fear the most in these woods, not some monster from local lore," Kurama mused as Hiei shot fireballs at Kuwabara's feet. 

Kurama is the smartest person I know, and most of the time he turns out to be right about stuff like that.

This time, though? 

Yeah. You guessed it.

This time, he couldn't have been more wrong. 


	3. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kuwabara has bad dreams.

I hated that jungle so much it hurt, mostly because it  _did_  hurt. It was like every fucking tree had leaves with knives on the tips, every vine was as big around as my wrist and was seriously set on strangling me, even the trees' fucking  _roots_  were out to get us. The goddamn mosquitoes, too, holy fuck, they were the size of birds and if you slapped one you got a palm full of blood for your trouble. I kept wiping their guts on Kuwabara's back, and when he threatened to punch me in the face I smeared some in Hiei's hair.

It took Kurama a while to get us all calm again, and he only succeeded because he promised he'd use his freaky flower-powers to get the foliage under control. Hiei zoomed off into the canopy above us to be alone (but not after lighting my pants on fire, the little fucker) and Kuwabara and I both had machetes to get through the brush with, but the way was still hard going even with Kurama at our backs. He tried to bend the plants out of our way as we walked, but he kept getting distracted by studying them and did a kind of crappy job, if you ask me.

We walked all day the first day, and when we stopped I felt like I was about to keel over dead. Kurama somehow made a shower of dead sticks come falling out of the trees; Hiei heaped them up and lit them on fire, and I cooked us dinner.

"What, you don't like the food?" I asked when I noticed that Kuwabara wasn't eating his share of Jungle Stew. It was actually pretty good, if I do say so myself. I'd packed dehydrated meat and Kurama found a bunch of forest-y herbs that made it almost taste like something you'd  _want_  to get back home.

Kuwabara jumped a little, sloshing stew out of his tin bowl and right onto his crotch. It was hot, so of course he let out a yelp and started jumping around to—well, I don't actually know what he was trying to do, but I laughed anyway until he sat down and grumpily ladled himself more stew.

"Food's fine," he grumbled. "I just don't like this jungle, that's all."

"Yes, I'm sure it's not nearly as nice as your cozy little bed back home," Hiei said. He sat outside the light of the fire, back against the trunk of a tree, sword cradled in his arms like a teddy bear.

Kurama tensed, probably expecting another fight to break out, but Kuwabara surprised us all.

"It's not that," he said without a trace of irritation. He stared moodily into the fire and then he peered over his shoulder with a gulp. "I just really,  _really_ don't like this place."

No one said anything. Kuwabara hunched into himself, arms around his knees.

"It feels like the trees are… I don't know, alive or something," he murmured. "Like they're watching me."

"They are alive, in both literal and figurative senses," said Kurama. He stared fondly into the canopy overhead. "Aside from being biologically living, the trees here are very old. After so many years, they have come to possess limited consciousnesses. They can even speak to one another. One can eavesdrop if one knows how to listen."

"And I'm assuming you do," Hiei said.

Kurama just smiled.

"They sayin' anything good?" I asked.

"Not at the moment. The forest is asleep." Green eyes flicked skyward, toward the moon peeking through the trees. "We probably should be, too."

Kuwabara shook his head. "Not me. There's no way I could sleep in a place like this."

Because he wasn't going to go to sleep anyway, Kuwabara agreed to take the first watch. When Kurama woke me up later to take my turn, Kuwabara had finally drifted off, but his face kept twisting like he was having a bad dream.

* * *

The next day was basically a lather-rinse-repeat of the first, at least during the morning. We ate a breakfast of granola bars and what was left of the stew and started walking. Kurama was in charge of the maps, but he still managed to use his flower-powers to clear the vines and plants for us, with better results than the day before. I guess the novelty of all the pretty flowers had worn off; we'd been practically buried in them for a day, after all. Anyway, Kuwabara was better than me at using the machete to clear brush since he was a sword-guy and had had practice, and Hiei could burn, slash, or just circus-monkey-jump his way around obstacles if he wanted, so I was basically dead weight until lunch, when I used what felt like my only useful talent in this stupid jungle and cooked us something to eat.

Kuwabara looked haggard as we ate, bags under his eyes as deep as bruises. Kurama asked him if he was OK and if he had gotten enough sleep the night before.

"Not really," the psychic grunted around a mouthful. "Nightmares."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

"…details, perhaps?"

Kuwabara put down his plate, scowling. "I didn't want to talk about it, but since you asked—I just saw a bunch of people dying. Screams, blood, stuff like that." He picked his plate back up. "Didn't see who killed 'em, dunno who died, just saw blood and screams and death. Leave it alone."

"There is no need to get defensive, Kuwa—"

" _Drop it_ , Kurama."

When we got moving again, Kurama waited for Kuwabara to pull ahead before murmuring in my ear: "There is more to Kuwabara's nightmare than he is letting on."

I stared at Kuwabara's back as he swung his machete at a particularly annoying vine.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, there is."

* * *

We were making good time and getting used to the jungle, and just when I was getting bored and also getting pretty good at using my machete, Kuwabara stopped walking. I ran into him and cursed, but he just stared off to the right, frozen, eyes locked on the trees like he was trying to see something far away.

"Watch it, buddy," I snapped.

He jolted like I'd woken him up. "What?"

"I said, you're in my way!"

His blank look turned into a scowl. "Shut it, Urameshi."

I tried to lighten the mood by taunting Kuwabara into some good-natured bickering, but he wasn't having any of it. He kept looking off into the woods; he did it so much that he kept running into jungley bits.

"No, don't help me," he snapped when Kurama offered to clear more plants especially for him. "I'm fine. Just spooked."

Kurama shrugged. "Suit yourself. I need to conserve my energy, anyway."

The plants in front of me ceased to clear out of the way and started doubling their efforts in front of Kurama. I lamented the loss of the flower powers by punching Kuwabara's arm. "Good going, asshole!"

In the canopy, Hiei let out a harsh laugh, and we started back up with the hiking. Stupid hiking.

* * *

So the plants were magically getting out of Kurama's way and Hiei was busy venting his frustrations on the treetops and I was whacking at shit with my machete when Kuwabara stopped walking. Again.

"You need to take a dump or something?" I snapped, but rather than answer he just turned off the path and plunged into the jungle. I leapt after him, yelling for him to get his ugly ass back where we could see it (and let the record show that that is the one and only time I will _ever_ ask to see Kuwabara's ass, even metaphorically) but he shouted at me to piss off.

"Something is over here!" he yelled, voice getting further away every second. He must've been running. "I gotta check it out!"

I looked at Kurama. He shrugged. Hiei sighed. Together, the three of us went after Kuwabara.

We caught up with him a few minutes later; Hiei stood off to one side while Kuwabara tried to climb over a boulder sandwiched between two massive trees. I started to call him a name, make fun of his climbing technique, but that's when I noticed Hiei staring off over Kuwabara's head through narrowed eyes. When Hiei isn't making fun of Kuwabara, you know something more important is up. Hiei turned to Kurama with a scowl. 

"Smell that?" he said.

Kurama took a deep breath, brow furrowing—and then his eyes opened wide.

"Blood," Hiei said.

"Blood," Kurama repeated. 

And then we were all scrambling after Kuwabara, because it turns out he was onto something, after all.


	4. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the going gets tough.

It took an hour, but we made it to wherever it was Kuwabara had been leading us. It was a camp of some kind, with ten or so straw-roofed huts filling up a clearing at the base of a rocky cliff. A waterfall spilled over the cliff and formed a stream that wandered off into the jungle, cutting through the middle of the village in a silver strip. The people in the camp probably used it as their water source.

Not that they'd be needing it anymore, since they were all dead and stuff.

I know bodies when I see 'em; hell, I've made enough bodies myself to know what they look like, and these guys were as dead as all get-out. Kurama muttered something about how they were guerrilla soldiers, probably part of some local gunrunner gang or drug cartel, but I couldn't listen to him because I was distracted by just how many of the dozens of bodies were little more than kids—kids with AK 47s and grenades on their belts, but kids nonetheless. The youngest couldn't have been older than twelve, but the oldest was an old man with white hair. He looked like the ringleader.

He was missing his body below his ribs.

Hiei took one look at the mess and flitted away in a flash of black. I saw him reappear on top of one of the huts, look around with blade-sharp eyes, and flit away again.

The rest of us just stared at the dead. It took a minute to be able to look away, and when I did, I saw that Kuwabara was sweating real bad and that his hands were shaking at his sides. He'd dropped his machete. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a light squeeze.

"I take it you've seen these guys before?" I asked, acting on a hunch.

He nodded. His voice sounded choked. "This was all in my dream. Only with more screaming. And people who were still alive."

"Shit." I looked to Kurama. "Any idea what could've done this?"

The demon picked his way across the clearing of carnage and knelt beside the white-haired guy with no hips or legs or whatever. He studied the corpse for a minute. Then he looked up at us. His face looked like a mask—a calm one, but I could see something brewing underneath.

"These wounds have been partially cauterized," he said, all clinical and detached and _Kurama_. "Whatever blew him apart did so with great force and heat, heat enough to melt bone and sear flesh."

"… like a rocket launcher, maybe?"

"This is much more precise than any human weaponry I am familiar with."

I sucked in a breath. "A demon, then?"

"No. This was caused by a weapon, not an energy based attack."

"The hell?!"

While Kurama started yakking about radiant energy and particles of what-the-hell-ever kind, Kuwabara looked up at the top of the waterfall and stared at it. He jumped when Hiei appeared in front of us, out of nowhere, and gave us a beady little glare that set my teeth on edge.

"There are no survivors," he said, "but I did find this."

His arm had been at his side, the thing in his hand hidden by the trail of his cloak. His hand moved and something sailed through the air to land on the ground with a meaty thud. The thing rolled, quivering, right onto my shoes.

No one spoke for a second.

Then, Kuwabara: "What is that thing?"

"Demon, duh." I kicked the head—because that's what it was, a severed head that sort of looked like a dog had gotten freaky with a purple octopus—off of my feet. Its tongue lolled from a long mouth, colored black and dripping off-white saliva. Its teeth were as long as my hand, I kid you fucking not.

Kurama knelt and peeled back the creature's eyelid with a fingertip. Steel blue with a vertical orange pupil. What the…?

"It is unlike any demon I have ever encountered," Kurama said. He didn't look worried, not exactly, but his shoulders were tight.

"Likewise," said Hiei.

Kurama continued his investigation. I tried not to inhale; the head stank like a pile of shit at high noon and holy crap, my shoes going to be  _so fucked_  after all of this. I looked down at my laces. They were flecked with aquamarine goop, goop that matched the stuff covering the head's ragged stump where a neck used to be. More goop leaked out of holes on either side of its oblong skull—ear holes, I guessed, ringed with a fringe of little purple feelers. The skin of its face was lumpy and slick-looking. Keiko would have probably suggested it get a facial.

Kuwabara moved a little closer to the severed head, and then he backed off and wheeled around to look at the bodies. His eyes darted to the top of the waterfall, narrowed, and then shifted down to the bodies again. He looked back to the creature to ask: "Do you think this thing killed these people?"

I had no clue so I didn't say anything. Kurama glanced at Kuwabara but didn't speak. Hiei just stared at the head like it owed him money.

"Guys, seriously—is this the demon Koenma wanted us to kill?" Kuwabara pressed. A hand tangled in his carroty hair. "I'd feel better knowing that the monster that did this got blown to bits."

I saw Kurama swallow and knew that he had something. "Kurama," I said. "Spill."

The fox demon pursed his lips in a really good impression of every disapproving teacher I had ever had. "Judging from the angle of the neck and the shape of the skull, I would hazard a guess that this creature is a quadruped."

"Say what?"

"It runs on all fours."

"Oh."

"This means that carrying a weapon would be all but impossible," said Kurama. He hooked a finger under the creature's lip and pulled the flesh back. "The teeth and claws are its most likely means of defense, and I see no indication that this creature possesses any of the necessary means of inflicting the wounds we observed on the solderis' bodies." He let go of the lip. It flopped onto the huge teeth with a smack.

I said: "So this thing didn't kill these people?"

Said Kurama: "I'm afraid not."

"Well if it didn't, what did?"

Kurama said nothing as he stared at the severed head. Hiei looked off into the trees, then cursed and swatted at a buzzing fly. Flies drifted off the bodies in black waves, investigating us newcomers like we were the fresh dessert after their main course of massacre.

Kuwabara turned, movements jerky, and looked back toward the dead camp. "The real monster is still out there," he said. His hands came up to grab his biceps; was he cold? "And guys, I don't mean to incite a panic or nothin', but I've been getting the tickle feeling for hours now!"

I knew what Kuwabara's tickle feeling meant just as well as the other guys. I squared my feet and balled my hands into hard fists, keeping an eye on the tree line as Kuwabara watched the camp. Kurama stood, hand creeping up into his hair, eyes travelling over everything like he was playing "Where's Waldo?" and Waldo was being a tricky jerk.

Hiei shut his eyes and ripped off the bandana covering the Jagan. The eye flared open with a spark of black light and purple iris. For a second the demon just stood there, searching, but then his red eyes opened.

"It's near," he said. "I can sense something."

"Demon?" Kurama asked.

"Not remotely." His eyes narrowed, tone dropping into harsh disbelief. "It's like nothing I've ever felt before, but it's strong. That much I can tell. The drive of the warrior is coming off of it in waves." His eyes narrowed further. "It's watching us."

"Does it mean to kill us, Hiei?" Kurama asked. He sounded as delicate as a ballerina made of knives.

Hiei's smirk could kill a puppy at twenty paces. "It won't get close enough to try," he said—and that's when Hiei doomed us all by being a stupid douchebag and pulling out his security blanket… I mean, his sword. Whatever. Point is, he pulled it out of its sheath and moved into a fighting stance, and when he did Kuwabara let out a cry and clutched his head. We all looked at him, morbidly, stupidly curious.

"Holy crap," Kuwabara said. His hands all but yanked at his hair. "Holy crap, something just changed, what—?" He looked at us, panicked face pale and gaunt. "Guys, guys, the thing watching us is—" Beady black eyes opened as wide as an anime character's. "Hiei, MOVE!"

"What in the world are you—?" Hiei spat, and that's when we all saw it. That's when we saw the thing that would haunt our steps for the next two days. That's when we saw what would turn our vacation in paradise into a walk through hell.

That's when we saw three beads of bright red light, arranged like a triangle and pulsing in a way that was anything but friendly, trained right on Hiei's chest.


	5. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Yusuke won't take this shit lying down.

Hiei stared at the three red dots on his chest like an idiot, and then he went blurry and disappeared. Not a moment too soon, because just then the tree behind him exploded. Like, literally. Boom, pow, I had splinters in my mouth and the tree's middle was a mess of pulp. We were a stiff breeze away from shouting "timber."

We'd fought together enough times to know the drill by now. Kuwabara and Kurama and I went back to back to back in a knot, all of us looking for whatever the fuck had fired that shot. Hiei reappeared to our left with a curse. Didn't take long for those dots to appear on his chest again. He growled, blurred out of sight, and the ground behind him exploded like someone had detonated a mine. Shit, whatever this was, it really had a hard-on for Hiei (gross). I scanned the trees, trying to figure out where the shots were coming from—

"There!" Kuwabara said.

I looked over my shoulder. He was pointing up at the cliff above the huts, way at the top. Nothing was there, though, so I called Kuwabara an idiot (because duh) and kept looking. But then he made a sound like a kicked puppy and usually I'm the only one who can punch him hard enough for him to make that sound, so I turned around again.

"Good eye, Kuwabara," said Kurama. His voice was deadly calm, the kind of calm that usually meant somebody was about to die. Or crap their pants. Whichever came first. "I see it, too."

"Yeah, well, I don't," I said. Hard as I tried, the top of the cliff was empty. Just blue sky and red rock, ho hum. "Do you need to get your eyes checked, or—oh,  _fuck_."

I saw it. I saw it, and I had no idea what the fuck I was looking at. One minute the top of the cliff was empty, and the next something…well, it rippled. Right where sky met cliff, the colors got murky and warped and weird, and then the warped patch moved a bit to the right. Hard to tell how big it was from this distance, but maybe eight feet tall and a few feet across? Bigger? Fuck if I knew.

"What the hell is that?" Kuwabara said. All the color had drained out of his face. He raised his hands and held them like he was gripping a baseball bat—Spirit Sword stance. "Is it…is it invisible or something?"

"I'm…not sure," said Kurama.

Hiei blurred into sight a few feet to our left. "Whatever it is, it's as good as dead!" he said. He hunkered down, eyes on the cliff like he meant to jump straight up there, but then the dots appeared on his chest. I started to shout but the thing fired off a shot before I could get the warning out. Fire exploded across Hiei's chest with a sound like thunder; he went flying, back slamming against a tree so hard the bark crackled and splintered.

"Hiei!" Kuwabara yelled.

"Fuck this shit!" I agreed. I spun and aimed my finger at the cliff. The tip glimmered electric blue as I powered up and squeezed off a massive Spirit Gun blast with a wordless roar. The bullet rocketed toward the cliff and collided with it, pulverizing the edge in a shower of jagged stone. Keeping my gun at the ready, I looked over my shoulder. "Is he OK?!"

Hiei, eyes closed, slid down the tree, but I knew better than to believe he wasn't in control. His energy felt just fine, if not pissed. When he hit the ground he crouched low, eyes finally opening, and he looked absolutely fucking  _murderous_. His cloak and shirt had disintegrated across his chest. He grabbed the clothing by the shoulder and ripped it all off at once, throwing it at our feet where it started to smolder and smoke. His bare chest looked raw, but he wasn't bleeding or anything.

"Why do you always lose your shirt in fights?" Kuwabara asked.

"Why are you always such a goddamn moron?" Hiei snarled.

"Now, now, Hiei," Kurama said.

"Shut up. I am going to find this thing and eviscerate it!" I could hear Hiei's teeth grinding from here. "That was a  _new cloak_!"

"Didn't know you were such a fashionista," I said—but then I saw Kuwabara looking at me with a face that said he wanted to barf. "The fuck're  _you_ staring at?"

His eyes bugged out. "Yusuke—!"

The thing shot me. A big flash of heat and then it was like someone had punched me right in the sternum with a hot poker. Hurt like an absolute  _bitch_. I hit a tree like Hiei had and landed on the ground in a heap. Lost my shirt, too, and my ears rang the way they did when Keiko really got going on one of her famous lectures. I lay there on the ground, blinking stupidly, until I got my breath back and could figure out how to sit up. Kurama was already kneeling next to me asking if it felt like I'd broken anything, but I waved him off and staggered to my feet. I looked at Hiei.

"Hey Hiei—get in line," I rasped. " _I'm_  the one who's gonna kill this thing."

He smirked. "Is that a challenge?"

"You bet your ass it's a challenge, short stack."

He grinned like a deranged garden gnome and hefted his sword higher. To be honest I didn't fucking care which one of us killed this goddamn thing. So long as it died, and died  _slowly_ , I'd be happy as a pig in shit.

 _Keiko_  had given me that fucking shirt.

This thing was gonna pay.


	6. Yusuke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the tough get going.

We didn’t get to commence with the killing right away because the Invisible Asshole (my creative name for the thing trying to murder us) kept firing. Just at Hiei and me, though, which was super fucking weird and also super fucking inconvenient. We dodged around like a pair of gymnasts (only without the stupid leotards), dirt flying and flinging as the shots missed us and collided with the ground.

Kuwabara hadn’t moved much since Asshole stated firing its weapon. Hadn’t had to. The thing wasn’t aiming at him. His head swiveled between Hiei and I like we were playing the world’s worst game of ping pong, eyes bugging nearly out of his skull.

“Oh man, oh man!” Kuwabara babbled. He held up his hands in the baseball bat gesture again, fingers crackling with energy. “What do we—?”

Kurama—who also hadn’t moved much because  _fuck that guy and his perfect hair_ —wheeled toward Kuwabara. He grabbed the guy’s arm and forced it down. Kuwabara looked like he wanted to barf again; I made a mental note to stay really far away from him, until, like, forever.

“Don’t summon your weapon,” Kurama said, voice low but hear-able. “I have a theory.”

“Is the theory that you’re fucking crazy?!” Kuwabara yelped. “It has a gun! Or something!”

“The creature has only attacked those who have drawn or fired weapons,” Kurama said. He waved toward all the dead mercenaries in the village. “It only attacks the armed. Remain unarmed, and it may not attack you.”

“That’s a pretty big ‘maybe,’ Kurama!” Kuwabara said. “How do you know if you’re—?”

Hiei’s eyes flickered toward the forest. “Incoming!” he said.

How Hiei managed to sense what came flying out of that forest, I have no idea. I was just a little bit too distracted to sense anything (getting fucking shot at will do that to a guy), but I guess Hiei’s weird eye is good for something. We all leapt back from the jungle’s edge as the trees at the edge of it started to shake and sway. Half expected a fuckin’ velociraptor to come running out of the trees (seriously, it was like something out of Jurassic Park), so I hunkered down and aimed my finger at the moving leaves, waiting for a dinosaur—

Turns out, it was a lot worse than a dinosaur.

First, there was four of them. Second, they were about the size of cows. And third, they were gigantic purple monsters with tentacles on their faces and rows of teeth and mucus-covered skin and big sharp claws on their dinner-plate paws. Nightmare fuel, basically, and nothin’ like any demons I’d ever seen. They leapt from the trees and stopped to scream at us, saliva flinging from their mouths as a sound like thunder and screeching tires tried to burst our eardrums. Their clawed feet raked the ground as they stood there, stamping in place and glaring with gleaming orange eyes.

Yeah. You got it. The head we’d found earlier definitely belonged to one of these ugly fucks.

“Demons?!” Kuwabara yelled.

“Not likely,” said Kurama. “They do not emit demonic energy.”

“Then what the fuck are they?!”

“I’m not sure,” Kurama said. His foot slid behind him, stance at the ready. “Nevertheless, do not draw your weapon, or—”

Too little, too late. The things brayed at us again and jumped our way. One headed for me; another headed for Hiei, who stabbed it through the face before fucking off into the tress because he’s an asshole like that. The final two dog-piled on Kuwabara; he went down with a screech, but as I swung an energy-coated fist at the dog coming for me (his head caved in under my hand with a spray of purple blood, by the way) a golden light erupted from beneath the monsters. They exploded outward, cleaved clean in half by Kuwabara’s dual-wielded Spirit Swords. He stood in a hero’s pose as dog guts rained down around him, ropy coils of florescent intestine twining around his shoulders like a scarf.

I rounded on him with a snarl. “Well now you’ve gone and done it!”

“Oh dear,” Kurama concurred, looking sad as hell—and then his eyes dropped to Kuwabara’s chest. “You might want to move.”

Kuwabara frowned. He looked down.

Three red dots danced across his chest, brilliant and fucking annoying.

Kuwabara’s face fell.

“Oh no!” he said.

And then his eyes bugged outed and he repeated “OH NO” in a voice like a six year old who’d eaten one too many pixie sticks. He threw himself to the side just in time, because a half second later the ground behind him exploded in a shower of dirt. Kuwabara looked over his shoulder at the smoking crater with his mouth open (somewhere up in the jungle canopy, Hiei laughed like a hyena on crack).

Kurama heaved a sigh. “I _did_  tell you not to draw a weapon.”

“Mental Note: Obey Kurama at all times, I get it, I get it!” Kuwabara hollered—and then the dots reappeared on his chest again. He shrieked and bolted to his feet, and then he bolted away from us and into the goddamn woods, gut-scarf flapping on the wind behind him. I called after him to slow the fuck down and stay with the group, because splitting up sounded like the worst goddamn idea on the planet, but then I heard a thud from behind me and stopped cold.

“Yusuke,” Kurama said, and his voice was doing That Thing It Does when Kurama stops playing games and needs me to focus up. He stood facing me, staring off older my shoulder with eyes so wide I could see white all the way around the colored bits—yeah, yeah, the iris, that’s right. Anyway, that look on his face scared me more than the earth-shaking thud noise at my back, which isn’t good at all, so I turned around with my finger at the ready to fire off another Spirit Gun.

Only, I couldn’t, because as soon as I saw that goddamn Invisible Asshole, I froze up.

It wasn’t a demon standing there, that much I could tell at first glance, because at first glance _it wasn’t even there_. That weird rippling haze from up atop the cliff? Yeah, that was standing just a few meters off, an eight-foot stripe of shifting colors and textures swirling into one another like...like TV static, really. I’ve met demons who could cloak themselves, turn invisible or just bend light in weird ways around their bodies, but this was something different. It looked digital, for one thing, shapes too geometric and pattered to be anything organic, and there was this weird high-pitched buzzing sound like when you leave on the radio but no stations are coming in—that sound you can feel in your teeth more than you can hear in your ears. You know?

But that’s not actually what tipped me off first, that this thing wasn’t a demon.

That had to be the way it just plain didn’t have any energy—not a kind I recognized, anyway.

Humans, demons, people from Spirit World like Koenma, they’ve all got energy. You walk into a room and you can feel it radiating like a space heater on your skin. Different colors and temperatures, sort of, depending on the person in question and if they’re from Spirit or Demon or Human World, but it all works the same. You get close, you feel that energy cloud, and the stronger the cloud, the further away you can be and still feel something.

This asshole, though?

Nothing.

I got nothing. Zip, zilch, nada, nit, nein. Keiko would be proud I know so many words for “zero,” basically, but in this case I’m not saying them to impress my girlfriend. You gotta understand, Botan—I felt _nothing_ off of this guy, and he was nearly ten feet tall and had massacred a village. The fact that I couldn’t sense him was weird as hell.

Not as weird as the Asshole looked, of course, but still.

It had just dawned on me that I couldn’t sense him when he let his cloaking bullshit drop, and with it went that annoying tooth-sound ringing noise (so yeah, that was definitely technology letting him cloak, not a spiritual technique). The monster was a big motherfucker, towering over us with these long-ass dreadlocks—yes, I said dreadlocks. Write it down. Quote me. That’s what they fucking looked like, OK?!

Anyway, he was huge as hell and had more muscles than ten Kuwabaras put together, which is saying something, and the skin on his arms was this dark green color where it wasn’t covered with armor. Yeah, armor, made all of metal and buckled together at the joints, covered in studs and some scratch-marks like this wasn’t the monster’s first fighting rodeo—but that wasn’t even the worst part. All the places the armor didn’t cover, were covered in fishnet.

Yeah. That’s right.  _Fishnet_!

To be honest, that was just too much for me. I mean, sure, he had skulls that didn’t look like any animals I’d ever seen stapled to the big plate on his chest and a bunch of huge fangs hanging from a necklace and he had this weird metal mask on, with glowing red eye-pieces set under an overhanging brow, plus there was a computer strapped to his arm or something? It was a little glowing screen, but anyway, between the fishnets and the dreads and the buckles on the armor, he looked like…well, nothing really compares, but he looked ridiculous.

But I forgot all about that when it talked.

Well. That’s not precisely what happened. It talking, I mean. More like _I_ talked _for_  it? It’s hard to explain, but as we stood there staring at each other there came this weird buzzing and clicking from behind the mask and then I heard my own goddamn voice come out of the monster’s head. Yeah! Exactly! _My own goddamn voice!_

“The fuck’re you staring at?” it said in my voice—and yeah, you’re right, that’s exactly what I’d said earlier to Kuwabara, right before I got shot in the chest by those little red dots. I just blinked at it for a second, and then I got mad. Who the fuck did it think it was, using my voice without permission? Fuck that noise!

“I’m staring at your outfit,” I said, waving at its horrible fashion choices. “Really? Fishnets and skulls? Where’s the rave?”

“Yusuke,” Kurama hissed, probably to warn me, but I didn’t give a shit.

“Get yourself a pair of furry-ass boots and you’ll fit right in, buddy,” I went on. I crossed my arms over my chest and laughed. “You think you’re intimidating, huh? Well, you ain’t so tough.”

Asshole didn’t move for a second.

Then it raised its arm, the one with the screen on it, and aimed its fist at me.

 Kurama’s hand closed around my elbow. “I think you’ve angered it,” he said in my ear.

“You bet your ass, short stack,” the thing said in my voice, quoting me yet-a-fucking-gain. The screen on its arm lit up with bright red symbols, a whirring noise cutting the air like swarming bees, and three red dots danced across my chest.

When it spoke next, it used Kurama’s voice, smooth and cool and calm.

“You might want to move,” it told us.

And it didn’t need to tell us twice.

Kurama and I exchanged a look, and we turned tail and ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It became more obvious here, but Yusuke is telling this story verbally to Botan. The "why" of that will be explained eventually, promise.  
> Kuwabara POV next chapter!


	7. Kuwabara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kuwabara runs off and finds something out of this world.

I just don’t see why I gotta be a part of all this, OK?

No, Botan, I’m _not_ shy. I just don’t want Yusuke reading this later and calling me names for acting rationally—because that’s what I did. I acted rationally, and Yusuke wouldn’t understand rational if it bit him on the butt. So unless you can promise me he’ll never, _ever_ read this—and that goes for you too, Jorge, even if you’re just the stenographer for the day. _No telling Yusuke anything._ You two got that?

Really? You mean it?

Well, let’s get started.

But first let’s get one thing straight: I didn’t run away from the fight because I was scared, which is probably what Yusuke would say I did, and he would be wrong as hell. I ran away because I needed to find the high ground and I couldn’t see the invisible monster and it had _a goshdarn gun pointed at my chest somehow_. Making myself scarce was a pretty simple tactical maneuver, when you get right down to it. Which is why Yusuke mistook it for me getting scared and running off, but I _wasn’t_ running off, I was just—

OK, OK, sheesh. I was just making sure you understood!

Like I said, leaving was a tactical decision. As soon as it aimed at my chest again, I went for cover and headed into the jungle to put distance between myself and the—the—well, I’m getting to what it was, so don’t rush me. There were vines everywhere and it was hard to see and so I just ran until I couldn’t hear Yusuke yelling stuff anymore, and then I ducked behind a big tree and crouched under a… I think it was some kind of fern? Kurama would know, but you can’t show this to him, either, you hear me? Anyway, I hunkered down under cover and then something slimy slid over my neck so I grabbed it and realized there was this _big ol’ loop of dog guts_ _on me_ and so I did what anyone would have done and shrieked and threw it into the woods as far away from me as I could.

Only as soon as I made a sound, I heard a _howl_. High pitched and shrieky, how the dogs sounded when they attacked, so I stood up and cursed and bolted into the woods again because no way in hell was I messin’ with another pack of those assholes. There’s a reason why I’m a cat person and that whole stupid jungle trip is just another mark on my list. Dogs are gross on the best days, let alone when they’re actually alie—um.

No, Botan. I’m fine.

Like I said: I’m getting there.

I ran and ran for what felt like an hour, but it couldn’t have been more than five minutes or so. Trees and vines and roots and rocks streaked past, trying to trip me at every turn, but the threat of mutated dogs and the invisible thing with the bad gun kept me from falling. Amazing what threat of death will do for a guy, huh? Eventually, once the dog shrieking got really far behind me, I crouched under another fern and tried to calm down. Took deep, slow breaths and evened out my energy, burying it deep so the thing with the gun couldn’t find me that way. I had no idea if it could sense energy or not, of course, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Long, slow breaths, ears perked, curled up at the foot of a tree, waiting—that’s how I spent probably ten minutes, listening to bugs buzz and birds sing in the canopy overhead. Somewhere in the distance I swear I even heard a monkey cackle, it got that quiet.

In that silence, in the dim shadows of the jungle canopy, I finally felt safe.

Kurama’s plant obsession finally started to make sense, by the way, but that’s beside the point.

Once it seemed the dogs had lost my trail, I stood up and moved as carefully as I could back the way I’d come—or I tried to, anyway, and this is the part you can’t tell Yusuke. You see, Botan, I’d run away so fast and had run for so long that I, well—

You don’t have to put it like _that!_

So sue me; I got lost! Like you would’ve done any better, a monster with a big gun hot on your heels. And no, I don’t mean demon. I mean _monster_. I hadn’t seen him yet, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t tell what he was. He was a monster, demon or no demon, and that’s why I was so dang eager to make a run for it.

How did I know he was a monster?

Easy.

I saw what he did to that village in my dreams. All the dying. The screaming. And— _urp_.

…

I’ll be OK. Just let me get this out.

That’s what I thought about while I tried to find the guys. I thought about that village, the little kids with their legs blown off, the blood filling ditches like too much red rain. And I kept catching blips of the guys’ energy off in the woods somewhere, but I didn’t dare reach out with my own power to pinpoint them or make a signal—not with that monster so close. Now, I couldn’t exactly sense the monster’s energy—Yusuke already told you it didn’t feel like anything we’d ever felt before—but I sure as heck could feel _him_ out there somewhere, all cold bloodlust and vibrating rage. He was like a killer walking a tightrope, eager to lash out and murder us, but too calculating to make a mistake and act out of impulse. Sort of like Kurama when Kurama gets really, really mad, only scarier, because the monster didn’t have some big world-ending goal like Sensui did. It’s hard to explain, but I knew deep in my gut that the monster wanted one thing, and one thing only.

He wanted our heads on pikes, our blood running all over his hands—and that was all. And that made him scarier than any of the Big Baddies we’ve beaten down before.

So I kept my head down when I walked through that jungle, trying to find the guys, but I just wound up getting more and more lost. Vines kept trying to trip me up and bugs kept biting my neck and I was getting frustrated and debating letting my energy flare, let loose and get someone to come find me just to put an end to all the _bullshit_ , when I stumbled out from behind a tree and found… well, it wasn’t a path. But it was a track, sort of, carved through the brush by a lot of walking, and for the first time I could stand up straight and not get a mouthful of leaves for my trouble.

“Now this is more like it,” I remember saying, stretching—but then I gulped and went quiet again.

There in the dirt at my feet I saw a pawprint.

Only, it wasn’t a paw.

It was a _foot_.

I put mine in the middle of it to check. Three big ol’ toes, a deep heel mark where heavy weight had rested. Bigger than a pro basketball player’s, even. Didn’t fit a dog pawprint, which meant it had to belong to…

The back of my neck prickled.

I gulped again and hid under the nearest fern. Right when I did I heard this weird whirring noise, and I looked up, and this weird metal box _thing_ about the size of a packing crate with a couple little rotary blades sticking out the back flew over my head, following the curve of the weird path through the underbrush. I’d gotten out of the way just in time thanks to my Tickle Feeling. Wasn’t sure what that metal box was, exactly, but I knew it couldn’t be anything good.

Just like how I knew, without really knowing how, that there was only one creature the footprint and that flying box could belong to—and I’d stumbled right into its freaking _nest_.

Yeah, I said “nest.” Though probably “camp” is more accurate, but hold your horses; I’m getting there.

Right about then, the guys’ energies all dropped off the map. I’m betting they’d done like me and suppressed their power to avoid detection. So, without being able to sense them at all anymore, I figured the one useful thing I could do in the meantime was scout ahead—maybe figure out what we were up against, give the thing a name more accurate than “monster.” Kurama would’ve approved, I thought, so I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and followed the weird flying box-thing down the path through the jungle. Kept low and quiet, trying to do my best sneaky-Hiei impression, eyes alert ahead of me for any sign of the monster, its dogs, or more flying bullshit.

I didn’t see any of those. Instead I just saw the trees thin out, the jungle dispersing and letting in more green-tinted light as the edge of the forest neared, and soon I had to squint in the glare of the sun when the canopy dropped away into open air—and I had to wrinkle my nose, too, because all of a sudden something didn’t smell so great, like rotten eggs and burnt bread and soot from an old camp fire. I didn’t dare leave the cover of the jungle once I got to the edge of the trees, no, but I crawled forward through ferns and bushes until I could see what lay beyond the edge of the deep, dark woods, holding my breath against that awful smell.

When my eyes adjusted, I almost wished I’d never left the forest at all.

The clearing was shaped like a circle. And I mean a _perfect_ circle. It was a perfect circle carved in the middle of the jungle and the ground had all been turned to black pebbles, like the trees had been charred by a fire so hot they’d turned to lumps of ash and coal, and when the wind turned in my direction my eyes watered from the stench of it. A fire burned in a pit ringed by stones way in the middle of the clear and there were a bunch of open cages on the other side of the ring—cages just big enough to hold those creepy dog-things that attacked us before. I only noticed those for a minute, though, cuz that’s when I saw the ship.

The ship.

Yeah. “The ship.” That’s what I said.

It was big. Real big, long and sleek and black with turrets jutting off the sides like the wings of a manta ray, edges inlaid with bronze carvings with symbols I’ve never even see before. Couldn’t see inside the ship, but I think it had long windows up the sides and at the front like the eyes of a big creepy bug, tinted dark and shiny like an oil slick. The ship wasn’t open, but I saw a slot on the side that maybe could be a door, and the two big turbines at the back that had to be some kind of engine. It was straight out of science fiction, that ship, color of its metal sides nearly blending with the dark forest at its back—and when the Tickle Feeling rose up strong again and another of those drones came flying into the clearing, a panel opened up on top of the ship. The drone went inside with a whir and hum and click and disappeared—and when the panel whooshed closed, it hit me. What I was seeing hit me like a ton of bricks to the face, dropping into my stomach cold and heavy and clear. The mutant dogs, the drones, the strange energy, the way it turned almost invisible, that fucking _gun_ —it all fell together likes the pieces of the world’s most fucked up puzzle.

That thing—, that thing was a _space_ ship.

Don’t look at me like that, Botan. I know what I saw, what that thing was, and Koenma was dead wrong about our mission. That thing he sent us after might’ve been a monster, but it was no demon. Koenma didn’t send us after a demon at all.

So what’d he send us after, exactly?

Oh, I’ll tell you what he sent us after.

He sent us after _a goddamn alien_ , that’s what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kuwabara is CHATTY compared to Yusuke. Yusuke just likes to hear himself talk, I think, so he engaged with Botan less. Writing in Kuwabara’s voice was hella fun, though. Really enjoyed writing this.


End file.
